PHP ERROR: [ionCube Loader] The Loader must appear as the first entry in the php.ini file in Unknown on line 0

[ionCube Loader] The Loader must appear as the first entry in the php.ini file in Unknown on line 0

Recently I had problem with apache after upgrade, and after checking log files, I found that error was

PHP Fatal error: [ionCube Loader] The Loader must appear as the first entry in the php.ini file in Unknown on line 0

This is because ionCube must be loaded before any of the Zend extensions are. So if you have the Zend extension/optimizer loaded, your php.ini should look like this to get ionCube to work:

[Zend]
zend_extension=/usr/local/ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.1.so
zen_extension_ts=/usr/local/ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.1_ts.so
zend_extension_manager.optimizer=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer-3.3.0
zend_extension_manager.optimizer_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer_TS-3.3.0
zend_optimizer.version=3.3.0a
zend_extension=/usr/local/Zend/lib/ZendExtensionManager.so
zend_extension_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/ZendExtensionManager_TS.so